SHOULD you ever happen to run into the Japanese ultra-genius pop star artist and handbag designer Takashi Murakami
at the Boom Boom Room of the Standard Hotel, on the eve of his latest
art opening, it may help if you have a few questions prepared.

Sample question: Do you find that conducting the whirlwind
jet-setting life of an ultra-genius pop star artist and handbag
designer leaves you time for quiet consultation with your muse?

Or:
What role does fate play in fame and global recognition? Do some
ultra-genius pop star artist handbag designers just get lucky, while
others wind up making Hendrick’s martinis behind a bar?

Or: Who styles your topknot? It’s kind of cute.

The
one thing you should probably never inquire of a person of Mr.
Murakami’s stature, on the eve of his exhibition at the Larry Gagosian
Gallery, on the final night of Fashion Week,
in the Boom Boom Room of the Standard Hotel, locus of all things flossy
and urgent and cosmopolitan for the last seven days (and, looking
forward, one might predict for the following 90), is what he thinks
makes a party fun.

If you present such a banal query, well, be
prepared for a look of smoldering incomprehension, a coldly evidenced
distaste for breaches in the protocols of global celebrity. You must be
ready to experience a displeasure that could atomize you, reduce you to
an integer of laboring-class nothingness, a mote of dust.

“Do you know who you are talking to?” a Murakami acolyte will ask you in a tone that is equal parts astonishment and horror.

“Why, yes.”

“Do you know who this person is?” the acolyte will repeat.

“Yes.”

And
then Mr. Murakami himself will give you a slow burn and mutter, “I
don’t like bars,” and then another acolyte will soothingly murmur,
“Let’s sit down,” and then the Murakami coterie will commence to fan
the pop star artist and handbag designer with flattery, much as drones
in a hive do a queen bee, so his core does not melt.

STROLLING through Chelsea this season could be a disorienting experience.

A year ago it was hard to know whether to celebrate the
neighborhood’s construction boom as part of a citywide architectural
renaissance or condemn it as another example of vain excess.

In
many ways Chelsea reflected how the convergence of money, fashion, art
and architecture was transforming the city. For every serious project
there were dozens of cheap knockoffs, their lobbies accented with fussy
wood veneers and third-rate works of art. Flamboyant glass exteriors
were a particularly aggressive form of exhibitionism — one that
sometimes seemed to embody the narcissism that has been poisoning
American culture for more than a decade.

Still, plenty of nice buildings came out of it. Frank Gehry’s IAC headquarters has settled into the neighborhood comfortably, at least from a distance. Jean Nouvel’s
luxury apartment tower at 100 11th Avenue on the corner of 19th Street
was eliciting oohs and aahs even before workers had finished assembling
its glittering glass facade. Provocative designs — some finished, some
not — also came from younger talents like Anabelle Selldorf, Neil
Denari and the team of Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote.

And then there was the arrival of the High Line,
whose low-key gardens and postindustrial aesthetic, hovering just above
the city’s streets on a former elevated railway, have injected a note
of civility into an area that too often seemed to be admiring its own
reflection.

Now the boom times are gone, and walking along the
neighborhood’s quiet streets one wonders who will be living here in the
grim times ahead.

Though work continues to creep along on a
handful of new projects, dozens of recently finished apartments are
empty. Developers have postponed other projects or cut budgets back to
a minimum; architects are quietly laying off staff. (Richard Meier,
whose twin glass towers at Perry Street marked the beginning of the
downtown boom, closed his office on Fridays last month because of lack
of work for the first time in his 46-year career.)

In the past
few months I’ve heard more than one critic suggest that the downturn
will be good for the cultural world — imagining, I suppose, that it
will spawn a more civic-minded vision of architecture as well as a
grass-roots art movement. (Think of the John V. Lindsay
administration, when pocket parks were touted as major civic
accomplishments and subway graffiti was celebrated as an art form.)
Others still hold out hope that a major government investment in new
infrastructure will lead to a New Deal-type revival, one in which
architects will play a central role.

Don’t hold your breath. It
is not clear yet that the culture that spawned this collapse is over.
Excess has always been part of the city’s character, and we shouldn’t
be all that surprised if some day the now ghostly towers are filled up
with Wall Street hipsters who bought in at bargain prices.

For
the time being these empty carcasses are stranded in a kind of limbo —
between the last gilded age and an uncertain, anxious future.